Message services are increasingly depended upon by users to handle their vital communications, such as email, telephony, and video communications. Monitoring and availability solutions are often employed to meet user expectations that a message service be both highly reliable and highly available. Monitoring and availability solutions work to keep the service elements that provide a message service functioning properly. In this manner, users are able to enjoy convenient and ubiquitous access to their messaging.
Monitoring solutions typically function to monitor the performance or health of a message service or the systems and sub-systems that provide the message service. Monitored characteristics of a service element, such as a process or machine supporting the message service, are reported, and when necessary, steps are taken to rectify shortcomings of the service element. For example, disk capacity, processor load, and other aspects related to the health of the service element can be monitored and upgrades or maintenance scheduled to improve the performance of the service element.
In contrast, availability solutions function to provide more immediate responses to critical performance aspects, such as detecting inoperative service elements and responsively initiating operations to keep a message service available. For example, should a service element fail entirely, an availability solution can ensure that a failover occurs to another service element that is available to take the place of the failed service element in providing an aspect of a message service. In addition, the availability solution may attempt to recover and restore the failed service element to the message service.